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Moto 360 Reviews Arrive
An anonymous reader writes: Reviews for the Moto 360 smartwatch have started to roll in. David Pierce at The Verge praises the design: the circular display is framed by an unadorned, stainless steel shell, and fastened to your wrist with a simple leather strap. At the same time, he criticized the battery life, saying the device averaged around 12 hours of use before it needed to be charged. Pierce adds, "The Moto 360's most impressive feature is that I stopped noticing it almost immediately. Whenever I wear the LG G Watch or the Samsung Gear Live, I'm constantly compelled to fidget with it; there's this unexplainable feeling of having something alien on my wrist that is there because I need to use it. The 360, on the other hand, just vanished into the spot left on my wrist by the Seiko watch that conveniently died this week." AnandTech takes a deeper dive into the device's hardware, noting that the TI OMAP 3 processor is built on a somewhat old 45nm process, which necessitates higher power consumption than newer, smaller processes. The Wall Street Journal says it's easy to get used to speaking into your watch for basic functions, but the software — and thus, the Moto 360 as a whole — still isn't quite ready for prime time. However, almost all the reviews agree that the smartwatch's time is coming.
i saw what you did there
Is the moto 360 a google product? If so I won't wear it.
Why don't you use Bing to find the answer?
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
You say the software isn't ready? I say the hardware isn't ready. How in the world is a watch with a battery life of 12 hours even close to usable?
Ooh, nice watch you have there? What time is it?
I don't know, the battery died around dinner time.
That sounds annoying. Does it happen often?
Yes, every frickin day!
It's a new thing called "fashion".
I'd much rather have a round watch than the current trend of recangular smartwatches.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
definitely won't be people
-Lod
In the quest for choosing bigger numbers, Android manufacturers have been increasing average screen size to the point where the phones themselves are too big to hold in one hand or put in a pocket.
This makes the phones great for watching movies and Netflix, and gaming, but positively lousy if you want to communicate with people. I mean, you can't put it in your pocket (at least the small tight formfitting ones), and it's too big and tiresome to keep digging it out every 30 seconds to see if you have a new text or email or Facebook post.
So they invent a smartwatch that lets you keep the phone in your bag or purse (because you can't carrying it anywhere else due to size), but you can still get texts and remain "connected" without having to dig out the monstrosity.
Of course, you may argue there are plenty of small screen phones, and yes, you're right, however, the flagships have been getting bigger and bigger. And people who have flagship phones generally are more interested in smart watches (more $$$), than someone who just gets whatever phone is free today.
That's why smartwatches are around - phones have been getting bigger and bigger, and soon we'll be hauling around bricks like 80s style cellphones. (Ironically, the move to smaller and smaller phones in the late 90s and early 00s lead to more people using Bluetooth because they were too small to talk to comfortably).
I gave up on the Pebble long ago (found it mostly useless), but one thing I do remember is that I was constantly running out of battery while out and about. I've been using an LG G watch for quite a while now, and running out of battery has never been an issue.
It is counter intuitive, but the LG's ~36 hours better life actually works much more reliably for me than the Pebble's two days (when it goes all buggy) to 7-8 days (when it doesn't, and you mostly ignore it), The reason is that I *know* I charge the LG every night, just like my cell phone. I quickly got into the habit of setting the watch down on it's charger thing as I put my wallet, phone, whatever on the nightstand etc. The LG is forgiving enough if you do forget to charge that you'll probably make it at least till noon the next day, but I almost never forget for the simple reason that it's a short, consistent pattern.
With the Pebble, I didn't want to wear out the battery by partially discharging each day then charging back to full each night (TBH I don't know if it's battery works that way, I just figure less charge cycles is probably "good" somehow.. shrug). So I tried to remember to check, pay attention to the low battery alert, whatever. It just didn't work. It was much more tedious and failure prone then just knowing I set something in a certain place each night. Sure, I could have just said screw it and charged it every night regardless, but then it's only equivalent to the Android options at best.
-Lod
I think it will be smart pants. We can call them smarty pants.
The whole "partial discharges are bad" thing dates way back to the old days of timer-based NiCd chargers. Back then, chargers were dumb - they terminated the charge cycle based solely on a timer, and not based on detecting a full charge. The infamous "memory effect" wasn't actually the thing at play in most cases there - it's actually extremely difficult to reproduce outside of a lab. The problem was simple overcharging due to dumb timed chargers. As far as users were concerned, the symptoms were the same as "memory effect" so the myth stuck.
In general, partial discharges/recharges of a lithium-ion are far less stressful to it than a full discharge/recharge. However - li-ion/li-po batteries tend to lose capacity more rapidly if they are routinely kept at a high state of charge. Lithium batteries are "happiest" when they hover around 50% state of charge. (This is one of the reasons Teslas default to only charging up to around 80% unless you specifically "top it off")
Lead-acids like most non-EV car batteries are quite different beasts - they are happiest when fully charged, and will lose capacity RAPIDLY to sulfation if let to sit when partially discharged.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?